Why a 'driven' Pat Shurmur deserves a second shot with the Giants | Politi

The request, from any other player, might have struck the old high school coach as strange. But when Pat Shurmur, then just a sophomore at a private school in Dearborn, Mich., first asked to borrow a 16-millimeter projector to watch game film, the request was quickly granted -- with one stipulation.

"Just don't break it," Wes Wishart told the young center on his team. "It's the only one we've got."

Shurmur picked up a reel of film each Thursday of that week's opponent, and within a few weeks, his family's living room was packed with teammates, friends and relatives for the impromptu film sessions. Even at a young age, Shurmur was looking for an edge.

"He was always looking for an edge, always so driven," Wishart said in a phone interview on Monday night. "I know the moment they put your name on the door in the NFL, they can take it right off. I get that. But I don't know how much better you can get than Pat Shurmur."

The Giants will make that case to their fan base now, and for many of the paying customers who suffered through this 3-13 mess of a season, that's going to be a tough sell.

Shurmur isn't a sexy hire. He isn't a hotshot coordinator who won Super Bowls with Tom Brady in New England, like Josh McDaniels. He isn't a defensive "genius" with an aeronautical engineering degree and an shaggy beard, like Matt Patricia. He brings a 10-23 record as an NFL head coach to East Rutherford, not exactly a line on a resume that fires up a fan base.

"If I were interviewing right now, Pat would be near if not at the top of my list of people I'd be looking at," former NFL executive Joe Banner told the Detroit Free-Press last week. And Banner, remember, is the guy who fired him from the Cleveland Browns.

Shurmur wasn't canned because of his record, although he certainly failed to live up to his reputation as an offensive mastermind in those two disappointing seasons. With a new owner in Jimmy Haslam, Banner said the Browns "felt we needed to start from scratch and really create kind of a new mindset, a new culture."

How'd that work out?

Wishart is still convinced that his former player didn't get a fair shake with the Browns, who went 5-11 in his second season but -- unlike the current team -- were competitive. Shurmur failed as a head coach, but with failure comes the opportunity to learn.

"I developed a list of things that, given another opportunity, I would never do again. I'll keep that private," Shurmur told the Philadelphia Daily News in 2014. "I know what the first six months of setting up an operation would be, in detail, and those can be the critical months for the success you're going to have. I'm certainly glad it happened."

It will be fascinating to see how he approaches those six months here. Can the mild-mannered 52-year-old win over a divided Giants locker room? Can he handle the New York media any better than the overmatched coach he is replacing in Ben McAdoo? Is he ready for the decision looming on Manning and all the controversy either choice will bring?

Time will tell. But the men who mentored him know that any failure won't be for lack of preparation.

"It all comes back to one thing: Intelligence," said George Perles, his college coach at Michigan State, in a phone interview. "He is a very smart man who knows what to do and how to do it. He always had every base covered."

Shurmur was the first player Perles, a four-time Super Bowl champion in Pittsburgh, recruited when he took over in East Lansing. He gave the anchor on a Michigan State team that ended a 31-year Rose Bowl drought his first coaching break, too, as a graduate assistant in 1988 when Shurmur decided a life in the suit-and-tie world at IBM wasn't for him.

Two of his 30 years as a coach get most of the attention, but Shurmur has had success nearly everywhere he's been as an assistant. He reached a Super Bowl with Donovan McNabb in his first stint in Philadelphia and guided Nick Foles to his best pro season in his second one.

He has the Vikings one victory away from the Super Bowl now, with career backup Case Keenum emerging as one of the league's best stories.

"Look at the design of the last play that won that game," Wishart said, referring to the pass Keenum threw to Stefon Diggs for the miracle finish. As all of Minnesota celebrated, the old high school coach marveled at how well the play -- Seven Heaven, they call it -- was designed.

Not that he was surprised. This is, after all, the same kid who borrowed that 16-millimeter film projector each week as a high school kid, the same coach who has spent his career looking for an edge.